Dark Knight and Sigmascape Savage Preliminary Thoughts

[Coatl]

DRK is weak because aside from its fancy resilience to magical tankbusters, it doesn't offer anything special besides that. Take for instance WAR, known for having strong physical mitigation in but poor magical. Yet people have no problem taking WAR as their main tank in O5s and O6s. This is because the utility that WAR brings coupled with its flexibility of cooldowns far outclasses whatever small advantage DRK brings. Vengeance is better than Shadow Wall, Holmgang is up twice as often as Living Dead, and DRK does not have a shake it off of its own to help mitigate common raidwides. And when push comes to shove WAR also has defiance to fall back on which is a monster of its own. Both Blackest Night amd Dark Mind are good, but not good enough to be noteworthy in this case when compared to the two titans that are PLD and WAR. Especially when Dark Mind requires extra MP just for its noteworthy affect..


I think you guys are too focused on DRK's DPS. No one will pick up DRK over WAR/PLD if it did about 300 more DPS. What's more important than personal DPS is the amount of UTILITY that a job can bring to the table so that other classes may do more DPS and allow for a smoother progression. You can look to Samurai and Blackmage as those are also classes that are less desirable this tier despite doing large amounts of personal DPS. They could rework DRK so many ways honestly, it's an open book. They could make blackest night shield stronger, cost more mana but increases the max gauge from 100 to 150 while also making your next bloodspiller do 1.5x more damage. DRK is just garbage right now. This is coming from someone who played it and loved it for the whole of heavensward and I'm very disappointed in SE for letting it fall through the cracks in Stormblood.

EDIT: I tried indenting but it didn't care? Sorry for the bad format.

[Chrono_Rising]

DRK is weak because aside from its fancy resilience to magical tankbusters, it doesn't offer anything special besides that. Take for instance WAR, known for having strong physical mitigation in but poor magical. Yet people have no problem taking WAR as their main tank in O5s and O6s. This is because the utility that WAR brings coupled with its flexibility of cooldowns far outclasses whatever small advantage DRK brings. Vengeance is better than Shadow Wall, Holmgang is up twice as often as Living Dead, and DRK does not have a shake it off of its own to help mitigate common raidwides. And when push comes to shove WAR also has defiance to fall back on which is a monster of its own. Both Blackest Night amd Dark Mind are good, but not good enough to be noteworthy in this case when compared to the two titans that are PLD and WAR. Especially when Dark Mind requires extra MP just for its noteworthy affect..


I think you guys are too focused on DRK's DPS. No one will pick up DRK over WAR/PLD if it did about 300 more DPS. What's more important than personal DPS is the amount of UTILITY that a job can bring to the table so that other classes may do more DPS and allow for a smoother progression. You can look to Samurai and Blackmage as those are also classes that are less desirable this tier despite doing large amounts of personal DPS. They could rework DRK so many ways honestly, it's an open book. They could make blackest night shield stronger, cost more mana but increases the max gauge from 100 to 150 while also making your next bloodspiller do 1.5x more damage. DRK is just garbage right now. This is coming from someone who played it and loved it for the whole of heavensward and I'm very disappointed in SE for letting it fall through the cracks in Stormblood.

EDIT: I tried indenting but it didn't care? Sorry for the bad format.

I would agree with everything except dps. Even when warrior brought little but dps it was desirable for the faster clear. I agree, dps is not enough on its own. But its one important piece of the jigsaw that makes dark knight disapointing.

1) DPS
2) Defense
3) Utility

It is behind in all three and needs to make relevant strives in all three.

It does not make sense to me that we have typed damage, and the class that doesn't need to know its protection defaults to having the highest overall protection (I'm talking about paladin). Typed damage makes sense in the game, but they need to implement it better. There is no reason blocking which needs 0 strategy or learning also mitigates the most damage compared to raw intuition and dark mind. I'm not saying throw out typed damage, but you should be rewarded for learning the types of damage and taking appropriate actions and you shouldn't be rewarded for not having to know and just pressing a button (which of course also rewards paladin further with more mitigation and procs free attack moves for free dps).

It doesn't make sense that classes which bring valuable utilities also bring more dps then those that don't. Party shields, sharing mitigation, and redirecting damage while mitigating it are powerful tools that help raid dps by helping healers, dark knight is being double taxed on this in bringing both the least dps and the least utility for dealing with raid damage. Again, I'm not an advocate for a shield with a cost, I think thats a really bad road for dark knight to go down when others do it for free. But giving dark knight a way to help the party heal up after damage and help healers regain their mp would be a lore driven and potentially free tool that serves the same purpose and has its own draw backs and uses (it doesn't help you survive the hit, but it helps you recover after).

I agree that there are alot of roads they could go down, but I just want to point out that giving up any one of these three areas is a bad idea, because the other tanks aren't giving up anything for what they are doing.

[Xan_Kriegor]

I think you guys are too focused on DRK's DPS. No one will pick up DRK over WAR/PLD if it did about 300 more DPS. What's more important than personal DPS is the amount of UTILITY that a job can bring to the table so that other classes may do more DPS and allow for a smoother progression. You can look to Samurai and Blackmage as those are also classes that are less desirable this tier despite doing large amounts of personal DPS. They could rework DRK so many ways honestly, it's an open book. They could make blackest night shield stronger, cost more mana but increases the max gauge from 100 to 150 while also making your next bloodspiller do 1.5x more damage. DRK is just garbage right now. This is coming from someone who played it and loved it for the whole of heavensward and I'm very disappointed in SE for letting it fall through the cracks in Stormblood.

EDIT: I tried indenting but it didn't care? Sorry for the bad format.

DPS matters a lot. You used BLM and Samurai to back your point but they aren't good examples for that. They are garbage right now because of their low rDPS. If DRK had 300 dps more than PLD and WAR it would mean that choosing DRK instead of other tank you would trade a lack of utility for an increase in the DPS of the raid which is also a kind of "utility" for your party.

[Aana]

DPS will always be the #1 priority until SE stops using hard enrage timers on everything in the game. The time they set often doesn't allow a lot of wiggle room (until you overgear and echo the shiz outta an encounter). They have decided (for better or worse) that raid DPS shall be the defining feature of progression in new content. Sure the mechanics are there and can kill you, but if DPS didn't matter (no enrages), then you could just do mechanics in easier ways disengaging DPS to deal with mechanics with no care for ruining their rotations. You could run 3+ tanks and 3+ healers. But we cant because DPS wouldn't be high enough. In many older MMOs there are low man strategies that a couple people can kill something over an hour or more by just taking more time and being slow and careful.

10 min enrages on every encounter in the game force DPS. It's not even about phase skipping. Higher DPS lets you still win even though somebody died or fudged a mechanic. Phase pushes are a side bonus. The higher the group DPS the sloppier youre group can be and still win. Its the 1 and only thing that actually makes a difference. DPS will be king until SE redesigns their encounters from the ground up (so probably king forever).

[Chrono_Rising]

Also just an aside, I pulled data on o8s for a total of 100 logs to compare main tank dps and damage taken per second.

On the turn where dark knight's mitigation is arguably at its best, Dark Knight ties warrior for highest damage taken. On this same turn 75% of all dark knight's are doing less dps than 75% of paladin's and warrior's.

[Valdegarde]

On the turn where dark knight's mitigation is arguably at its best, Dark Knight ties warrior for highest damage taken.

Just on the basis of the difference between Grit and The Blackest Night usage and how Defiance works alone, the fact that it's a tie should be concerning.

If the dev team and people who tout the wonders of The Blackest Night should be believed, Dark Knight should be taking the least amount of damage due to The Blackest Night shielding so much of it, and Warrior should be taking substantially more due to the main tanks that must go in and out of Defiance and living through busters with Holmgang and being healed for more.

This highlights what I consider to be Dark Knight's biggest weakness among their current weaknesses, having little to no answer for "fluff" damage that adds up and is fairly regen-able in much content but becomes a nagging nuisance in harder content.

[Chrono_Rising]

Just on the basis of the difference between Grit and The Blackest Night usage and how Defiance works alone, the fact that it's a tie should be concerning.

If the dev team and people who tout the wonders of The Blackest Night should be believed, Dark Knight should be taking the least amount of damage due to The Blackest Night shielding so much of it, and Warrior should be taking substantially more due to the main tanks that must go in and out of Defiance and living through busters with Holmgang and being healed for more.

This highlights what I consider to be Dark Knight's biggest weakness among their current weaknesses, having little to no answer for "fluff" damage that adds up and is fairly regen-able in much content but becomes a nagging nuisance in harder content.

Agreed. I posted my graphs with my findings in a discord but I’m not sure I can post them here without being banned.

It took awhile to gather the data, but when I have time I plan to collect data about tank busters and auto attack damage to get more specific answers.

I find this especially concerning since this turn is meant to be the place where dark knight’s kit outperforms everyone and it comes out tied for last place.

Last place for damage mitigated.
Last place for dps.
Last place for utility.

[Mycow8me]

I think some of it has to do with DRKs not wanting to use TBN as much as they could do to MP cost and cooldown. Since it costs MP, its arguable to use it as a DPS gain unless you can get another bloodspiller in during buffs/vuln ups or something. Since it has a cooldown, drks consider it an emergency or something to complement with another cooldown like rampart. Its a mentality. If this was meant to be a fluff mitigation tool, it needs to not have a cooldown and cost a little bit less mp so we can see gains using it. Make us want to use it.

There's other ways fluff mitigation could work though. I've talked to other DRKs and some of them just consider TBN an augment to another cooldown to save a healer GCD for small tankbusters. In alot of AOE situations using TBN is almost pointless cause healers are going to follow up with a AOE heal anyway.

[Aana]

Also just an aside, I pulled data on o8s for a total of 100 logs to compare main tank dps and damage taken per second.

On the turn where dark knight's mitigation is arguably at its best, Dark Knight ties warrior for highest damage taken. On this same turn 75% of all dark knight's are doing less dps than 75% of paladin's and warrior's.

Which turn are you talking about, and as MT or OT?

[Chrono_Rising]

Which turn are you talking about, and as MT or OT?

O8s limited to main tank role.